Educators Mull Potential NAFTA Impact on Schools

As far back as 1981, Gene Brust was already making connections on
the other side of the United States-Mexico border, which lies three
miles from his office.

Mr. Brust, the superintendent of Arizona's Palominas school
district, sent 40 students to spend three days that year living and
attending school in the Mexican town of Arizbe.

While his efforts began long before the North American Free Trade
Agreement was drafted, Mr. Brust hopes he has helped prepare his
students for its repercussions. If NAFTA is approved, other educators
may find themselves following his lead.

The House is expected to vote next week on NAFTA, which would remove
trade barriers between the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

While the pact includes no education provisions, schools may feel
its effects as they cope with new immigration patterns, alter
vocational programs to meet new workplace demands, and try to
coordinate curricula and procedures to allow for greater
transferability between schools in the United States and Mexico.

The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education
Association oppose NAFTA, following the lead of most organized-labor
groups. Labor leaders fear that NAFTA would accelerate the movement of
jobs out of the United States, a shift the teachers' unions argue could
erode the property-tax base that foots much of the bill for public
education.

"I don't see getting around the fact that there will be dislocation
from local communities. Anything that makes it more difficult for
schools to provide services ... is something we would oppose,'' said
Michael D. Edwards, an N.E.A. lobbyist.

If NAFTA works as intended, higher Mexican wages resulting from
greater prosperity would, in theory, reduce illegal immigration to the
United States over the long term. But most observers agree that the
pact would likely spur immigration from Mexico in the short run--and
increase the number of immigrant children, most of them
non-English-speaking, that U.S. schools must cope with.

Mary Jo Marion, a trade-policy analyst for the National Council of
La Raza, said that more Mexicans may indeed cross the border, and that
they may choose to settle in "nonconventional places.''

New Educational Demands

James J. Lyons, the executive director of the National Association
for Bilingual Education, said the need for proficiency in multiple
languages would grow under NAFTA, as would Mexican students' demand for
an "American'' education, whether or not they move across the
border.

Both he and Rita Esquivel, a former director of the Education
Department's office of bilingual education and minority-languages
affairs, said NAFTA would be a spur not only to teaching
Spanish-speaking students English, but also to teaching monolingual
English-speakers Spanish and French to take advantage of the three
countries' closer relations.

Anthony P. Carnevale, the chief economist for the American Society
for Training and Development and the chairman of the National
Commission for Employment Policy, predicted that NAFTA would accelerate
the replacement of low-skill U.S. jobs with ones requiring more
education, especially technical education.

"In the end, NAFTA is probably good news for young people in the
United States, and schools will respond, I have every faith, by
producing those people,'' Mr. Carnevale said.

At the federal level, education officials from the United States and
Mexico already have signed a series of cooperative agreements. In 1991,
federal officials and educators from both countries met for two days in
El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. (See Education Week, Oct. 16,
1991.)

More recently, a commission created by the State Department has
facilitated talks between education officials from both countries. In
addition, four American assistant secretaries of education attended a
two-day meeting in Mexico City last month. Mexican officials will
travel to Washington next spring, said Stewart Tinsman, the director of
international and territorial services in the Education Department's
office of intergovernmental and interagency affairs.

But critics say these efforts have not been sufficient, and border
educators who attended the 1991 conference complained that little
attention was paid to their practical problems.

Macario Saldate, the director of the Mexican-American Studies and
Research Center at the University of Arizona's Tucson campus, said the
Education Department's efforts at forging linkages with Mexico were
"useful for anecdotal information, but lacked any kind of systemic
analysis.''

Eugene E. Garcia, the director of OBEMLA, predicted that NAFTA would
bring schools far from the border into talks on teacher exchanges and
joint training. "Preparing students for the workforce of the 21st
century is very much on ... our minds,'' he said.

Most educators agreed that NAFTA would prod more districts to
increase ties with their Mexican counterparts.

For Roberto Moreno, the superintendent of the Calexico, Calif.,
schools, forging those ties is a key part of managing his district,
where 99 percent of the students are Hispanic.

Mr. Moreno has his dry cleaning done, eats Chinese food, and gets
his hair cut across the border in Mexicali, a city of about one
million.

Trends that experts say would likely spread under NAFTA already have
manifested themselves in Mr. Moreno's 22,000-person community, with
companies like Wal-Mart and Toys 'R Us setting up shop in an area with
25 percent unemployment.

The district opened a new junior high school last month and plans to
open a new elementary school soon.

"That'll just keep our heads above water,'' Mr. Moreno said, adding
that a local developer told him Calexico's population could grow 10
percent over the next five years.

"Our underlying, unspoken thoughts were that these kids would start
in Calexico and then move away,'' Mr. Moreno said. "Now it's likely
we're going to want to send our kids to be engineers and technical
experts or trade lawyers ... and then return to our community to apply
those skills that NAFTA will demand.''

He has spoken with educators in the Mexican state of Baja California
Norte about streamlining student records to allow for more fluidity
across the border. He has also spoken with athletic officials about
allowing his football teams to play in Mexico.

Similar exchanges have been launched by state officials and local
educators in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas.

For example, Texas and New Mexico last month signed a resolution
"recognizing the hemispheric roles upon which their respective states
are about to embark.''

Officials at the Texas Education Agency said they have discussed the
possibility of a binational diploma with Mexican officials.

And district officials in Los Angeles and Chicago recently signed
agreements to recruit Mexican bilingual teachers and purchase
Spanish-language textbooks from Mexico.

The "Hands Across the Border'' program Mr. Brust launched in
Palominas, meanwhile, is now run by a foundation, which each year
provides cultural and educational experiences for over 4,000 students
from Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

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